1 Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improvement in a tray for supporting notepaper, and in one aspect to a new configuration of a tray for supporting the stack of notepaper to permit dispensing single sheets from a stack of notepaper without separating the stack from the support.
2 Description of the Prior Art
Notepaper has become commercially available by the assignee of this application, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, wherein the stack of sheet material comprises a plurality of sheets each of which are coated with a narrow band of readily releasable pressure-sensitive adhesive along one edge and the sheets are stacked with the adhesive coated edge of each sheet positioned above each other adhesive coated edge. The band of adhesive ranges between one-fourth and three-fourths of an inch wide. The individual sheets may be readily withdrawn from the stack by peeling the sheet and its adhesive from the next adjacent sheet in the stack. The adhesive is a readily repositionable pressure-sensitive adhesive such that the separated sheet may be attached to another sheet or other receptor surface and readily removed without tearing the fibers of the other sheet or receptor surface upon later separating the sheet.
A stack of this notepaper is adapted to be supported on a holder such as is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. Des. 273,798 issued May 8, 1984. This particular prior holder had a surface for supporting the stack of sheet material and relied on the adhesive on the surface of the lower sheet of the stack or on an additional strip of adhesive to secure the stack of sheets or pad to the support surface on the holder. After several uses of the pad holder, it was noted that the surface would become soiled or the strip of adhesive applied to the holder became contaminated such that the pad was not secure enough to the holder to permit separation of one sheet from the stack without the separating force being sufficient to also separate the entire stack from the holder, particularly as the number of sheets in the stack was depleted. Therefore, improvements in holders for dispensing the pressure-sensitive adhesive coated notepapers from a stack became desirable.
The present invention describes an improved notepaper dispenser which affords a support surface for supporting a stack or pad of sheet material and on a surface which permits writing on the notepaper before the same is removed from the stack. Further, the holder of the present invention provides means for holding the bottom sheet in a stack against movement in the plane of the support surface. The holder for the notepaper is provided with abutment means which projects above the plane of the support surface supporting the notepaper to restrict movement of the stack during the separation of the uppermost sheet from the stack and peeling forces from being applied to the band of adhesive on the lowermost sheets.